On a slow boil

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The Line of Beauty, Allan Hollinghurst's
exploration of gay lust and ambition in Margaret Thatcher's era,
beat five other novels on Tuesday to take out the Man Booker Prize.
He tells Anthony Quinn that he works very, very
slowly.

As we begin our companionable ascent of the stairs to his
topfloor flat in Hampstead, I mention to Alan Hollinghurst that all
I could hear as I walked along his street was birdsong. "Mmm," he
considers, "though even that wouldn't be to everybody's liking.
There's a line somewhere in Ronald Firbank's letters where he
describes a nightingale outside his window as a perfect
scourge'."

Outside Hollinghurst's study window, Parliament Hill basks
gorgeously in the late afternoon sunlight; with austere
self-denial, he has placed his desk at the far wall to stop himself
gazing out on it.

One gets the impression from his orderly shelves and neat
stackings that he is a highly organised writer. He has previously
referred to his procrastinating habit of "loiterature", loafing
around his flat and listening to Wagner until shame forces him to
his desk, but the evidence of his output - four novels since 1988,
published mostly with six-year gaps - argues a steady if not
scintillating diligence.

"I am very slow," he says. "It takes a long time for it to
become clear what I want to do."

Does he ever feel panicked by that? "I don't, actually. That's
one of the main wisdoms you can gain as a writer, that you come to
an accommodation with your own tempo."

His latest novel, The Line of Beauty, which has just
won Britain's £50,000 ($125,440) Man Booker Prize, one of the
world's most prestigious literary awards, is also his finest. It is
a wonderfully subtle tragicomedy of manners and mores - and a
vindication of his dilatory procedure.

This cuttingly fastidious view of gay lusts and ambition in
Margaret Thatcher's Britain beat five other novels, including the
runaway favourite, David Mitchell's highly touted and already
high-selling Cloud Atlas.

Hollinghurst's book was the first gay novel to win the Booker in
its 35 years. The chairman of judges, the former arts minister
Chris Smith, said: "This was an incredibly difficult and close
decision. It has resulted in a winning novel that is exciting,
brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite
1980s. The search for love, sex and beauty, is rarely so
exquisitely done."

Historically, The Line of Beauty picks up where his
scorching debut, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988),
concluded in 1983, the "last good summer" before AIDS began its
devastating swathe. Nicholas Guest, shy and bookish and just down
from Oxford, becomes a lodger in the baronial west London home of
his college friend Toby Fedden, whose father, Gerald, is a
bumptious Tory MP and a rising star of the Thatcher government.

Under the Fedden aegis, Nick is granted access to a seductive
climate of money and privilege, while through a black council
worker, Leo, he embraces the new freedoms of metropolitan gay life.
A later affair with a handsome, depraved millionaire introduces
Nick to cocaine and, eventually, the consequences of high living in
a low, dishonest decade.

Nick is nominally working on a thesis on Henry James, who
is the novel's presiding genius. A photograph of the Master sits on
Hollinghurst's mantelpiece, below the Venetian mirror, and feels
almost deliberately placed there as a prompt to the interviewer.
Was it his intention to emulate the high Jamesian style?

"Perhaps it was in part that, to make the book an implicit
defence of style in itself. There's that extraordinary thing in
James where everything becomes subsumed into his style, but I
wouldn't want to write anything that had that extremity about it.
Not yet, anyway," he adds slyly. "I had become a rather theoretical
Jamesian, actually. I thought he was marvellous, but I didn't read
him much any more."

An invitation to join a reading group exclusively devoted to
James made Hollinghurst examine the work again. "I found him more
and more absorbing, that intelligence you feel in everything he's
doing, and that capacious, witty sense of control."

Hollinghurst strikes you as someone who would have been quite at
home in a James novel. His voice, purring, clipped, deep - Basso
Profundo, as his colleagues used to call him when he worked at
The Times Literary Supplement- belongs to an age of
dowagers and davenports. Behind his spectacles, his eyes glint with
hawkish and faintly droll appraisal. So exact and witty is the
notation of social and tonal nuance in his work that one can't help
suspecting oneself, lolling there on his sofa, of being under a
similar kind of inspection.

As one reviewer noted, Hollinghurst, like James, is one on whom
nothing is lost. He is especially good at listening to the way
people talk:

In Rachel's conversation a murmured mmm' or drily
drawn-out I know' could carry a note of surprising
scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way
of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement or
disagreement; he longed to master it himself.

Hitherto, the great novels about the 1980s - Money by
Martin Amis, What a Carve-Up! by Jonathan Coe, and Tom
Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities - have been sulphurous
satires on greed and excess. Granted hindsight, The Line of
Beauty offers a more considered, but no less piercing scrutiny
of the age, with Nick propelled to the hub of the Tory revolution
while ever mindful of his uncertain insider-outsider status.

Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music
of Time, he is an ambiguous observer not only of the English
ruling class but of the grubby, grabby years in which it
thrived.

"He's a rather passive, weak, morally cowardly person," says
Hollinghurst, "the sort who could be easily played on by the forces
of the period. I've been terribly surprised by the extremes of
reaction to him among friends who've read the book - some have
loathed him, others have found him quite sympathetic."

Such reactions could be attributed to the author's refusal to
point the moral finger: even Gerald is more a genial oaf than a
simple monster of ambition. "I've always been more interested in
revealing people in their world and letting the ironies
accumulate.

"I avoid writing things with a clear moral message; I'd rather
the books draw readers into making their own decisions, to work out
their own feelings."

A criticism often levelled at Hollinghurst involves the short
shrift he has given women characters; only Edie, in his second
novel, The Folding Star, has made even a fleeting
impression on the distaff side. The new book, while prominently
male-oriented, goes some way to rectifying this.

Gerald's mother, Lady Partridge, is a fantastically awful old
bird, glazed with snobbishness, and his manic-depressive daughter,
Catherine, is a vocal counterpoint to the yahooing Tories who swarm
through the book.

Hollinghurst even dares to introduce the prime minister herself
at one of Gerald's parties, when Nick boldly asks her to dance. Did
he take an extra long run-up to this scene?

"I always knew she was going to make an appearance as the climax
of Gerald's comic infatuation with her. It was great fun to
do."

Though he presents a pretty hostile picture of Mrs Thatcher's
period in office, it is rather clever of Hollinghurst to have
nothing but praise voiced for her throughout the book.

It also differs from his other three novels in being less
fervidly preoccupied with carnality. Or, as I put to him, there's
much less sex. "Yes, I'm so sorry," he replies with a short,
gasping laugh.

Did he feel a weariness of it? "Not exactly. The urgency and
novelty of writing about sex in my first book has gone, I
suppose."

Given that sex is less insistently foregrounded in this book, I
wonder if Nick could have been written as a heterosexual character.
"I don't think so. Even with a third-person narrator, you're
spending the whole book, more or less, within this sensibility, and
I don't think I would have been able to write about complicated
things within that consciousness if he'd been a heterosexual."

A phone call interrupts our chat, and after a few curt sentences
Hollinghurst hangs up. "Somebody asking if I want to make a will,"
he says, bemused. That job has already been done, he admits.

"There's something rather old about 50, isn't there? Just the
word itself is rather stiff and dusty." But there is a sanguine
note in his voice, as well there might be.

Hollinghurst is in the prime of his writing life, and the
immaculate rolling cadences of his new novel are right now the
keenest pleasure English prose has to offer.